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Today Theresa May announced her intention to hold a General Election in Britain on 8 June. She is certain to get her way, notwithstanding the Fixed Term Parliament Act. Personally I’m not happy – this is an unwelcome distraction from other things I need to do – and my post on mental health has been swamped. Unable to concentrate on much else, I’m going to post again.

The first thing that strikes me is that British politics is littered with people that have underestimated our Prime Minister. This election was an almost total surprise. Rumours had circulated earlier in the year of a a General Election, but faded when it was clear it would not be on the first Thursday in May, which has now become the traditional date for elections in Britain. (A practice established by John Major in 1992, and only broken in 2001 because of an outbreak of foot and mouth disease. But before that Margaret Thatcher preferred June elections, a parallel that will no doubt please Mrs May). This surprise shows how tight a ship she runs compared to her ill-fated Labour predecessor Gordon Brown, whose career had otherwise had some striking parallels. Mr Brown’s reputation was destroyed because he let speculation about an early election get out of hand, and then lost his nerve.

The second striking thing is how unusual it is for us to have a snap election in the UK. Until now Prime Ministers have waited until the fourth or fifth year of parliament’s term. The date has been widely known well in advance (though in the case of the four year terms favoured by Tony Blair and Mrs Thatcher, not for certain), allowing for a lot of pre planning. We have to go back to 1974 for one like this one, unless you count 1979, when the Callaghan government was brought down by a vote of no confidence less than six months before its term had run. And even the 1974 parallels aren’t that strong. This is uncharted territory. The parties will be fighting with much less pre-planning. The campaign could be much more chaotic than the carefully choreographed ones we have been used to.

Politically the election is dominated by the weakness of the Labour Party. Already demolished by the SNP in Scotland, it shows no signs of recovery there, and looks very vulnerable everywhere else. Its opinion poll ratings are very low – about half the Conservative vote. I have not seen any analysis of what this means in terms of the party’s vulnerability in particular seats. It has a large number of very safe seats, so it might well hang on in lots of places, while doing catastrophically in Middle England. The party has two huge problems. The first is that the political agenda is clearly on Brexit, where its message is weak – it will not be rewarded for reflecting the confusion that much of the voting public has on the topic. Much as it would like to move the debate on to austerity, where cuts are now looking quite alarming in places, this looks like a doomed enterprise. And that is because of their second major problem: a spectacularly inept leader in Jeremy Corbyn. By itself this ineptitude is not fatal – after all he has done well in Labour’s internal elections – but the public don’t see him as a prime minister in waiting. Time an again that has proved a fatal handicap at election time. Without that credibility Labour can’t change the agenda.

So the Conservatives are looking confident. It seems that their key electoral message is that Britain needs a strong government right now, regardless off what that government actually plans to do. But the messaging will not have been exhaustively tested, so we don’t know how this will actually play. It seems clear that they will be able to beat off any threat from Ukip, but they may find it harder to manage the Lib Dems.

The Lib Dems are in a very interesting position. Most people considered them wiped out after the last general election in 2015, when they were punished for having been in coalition with the Conservatives. But the Brexit referendum result has energised the party. It has now reliably retrieved third place in the opinion polls (though still only half of even Labour’s disastrous score), and its membership is booming. It has a clear position on Brexit. The Tory strategy in 2015 was mainly to destroy their coalition allies – on the principle that you should always go for the weakest opponent first. That meant they won many more seats from them than they did from Labour. But holding those seats could be tricky, since the messages that worked so well in 2015, which relied on a strong Labour threat, lack punch now -and the Tories are unlikely to have the same organisational strength, since this is a snap election.

So the Lib Dems could make a big comeback. Big enough to stop the Conservatives from getting a majority? Almost nobody would suggest that. The closer the party gets to achieving that aim, the more powerful the Conservative message about strong government will become. But after the last year we have started to expect the unexpected. The Tories will make little headway in Scotland (even though they now outpoll Labour there). They may find that taking many seats from Labour means going deep into their strongholds. Their high poll rating could simply mean piling up votes in seats they have already won.

So, much as I find this election personally unwelcome, it will be an interesting one to watch. My hunch is that the Conservatives will end the election in much the same place that they started it – but with fewer Labour seats and more Lib Dem ones on the opposition benches. But am I making the fatal sin of underestimating Theresa May?

After a couple of days sightseeing in York, one of England’s most spectacular cities, I want to report back on the Liberal Democrats’ conference held there over the weekend. It ended with the traditional rallying cry from the party leader Tim Farron. He spelled out a bold strategy for the party: to replace Labour as the principal opposition, and then to take on the Conservatives for government. Well that’s not the first time I’ve heard such ideas from a Lib Dem leader’s speech – and the only result has been that the party’s wings melted like those of Icarus when it got too close to the heat of power. Could this time be different?

The Lib Dems are particularly taken by the result of the recent General Election in the Netherlands, and their hopes rest on similar trends being repeated in Britain. Now if your knowledge of the Dutch election was based reporting by the BBC News, and other mainstream news outlets, you might be a little surprised. The BBC pitched the contest as between the party of the Prime Minister, Mark Rutte, the VVD, and the populist-right PVV, a one-man vehicle for its leader Geert Wilders, and his extreme views against immigration, the EU and Islam. The BBC hunted out Dutch working class voters for its vox pops, giving us the impression of a surge of support, in the manner of that that swept Donald Trump to power in the USA. The VVD meanwhile, though nominally a liberal party, seemed beholden to the PVV agenda, and anxious to sound tough on immigration, engineering a spat with the Turkish government to prove their point. When the VVD ended up with 33 seats, in the highly proportional Dutch electoral system, to the PVV’s 20, the BBC proclaimed the VVD as the winner, and quickly moved on.

But there a 150 seats in the Netherlands parliament, so the VVD and the PVV covered barely a third between them. Elsewhere something much more interesting was happening, which puts the whole picture in a different perspective. There were in fact two main losers in the election: the VVD, which lost 8 seats, though remained the largest party, and, most spectacularly, the Labour Party (the PvdA), which was reduced from 38 seats to just 9. The PVV advanced by 5 seats, but there were bigger winners. D66, the liberal left party most similar in outlook to the British Lib Dems, advanced 7 seats to 19; the Christian Democrats (the CDA), a party not unlike Britain’s Conservatives as they are being refashioned by Theresa May, also took 19 seats, gaining 6; and the biggest winner was the GreenLeft, which advanced 10 seats to 14.

What to make of this? Well it is fair to suggest that Mr Wilders and his PVV has set the political agenda. The CDA did well by coopting some of its ideas, and the VVD managed to hang on with similar tactics. But the two parties that where most vocal in promoting the opposite agenda, of voicing a sense of Dutch identity based on tolerance and being part of Europe, picked up 17 seats and have real momentum. The traditional Labour party was unable to hold together its coalition and collapsed.

And so the implications for British politics are clear. Mrs May’s strategy for the Conservatives, with a lurch to right on identity and social issues, and to the left on economic ones, looks sound enough. The polls show it has a commanding lead, crushing the populist Ukip, and even doing respectably in Scotland. Labour, meanwhile, are floundering – unable to find a formula that holds together its coalition of traditional working class, new working class (including ethnic minority workers) and liberal public sector workers. Its problems are compounded by spectacularly weak leadership, and a sense of political entitlement amongst its membership that makes them focus inwardly, rather than develop an effective political presence in the country at large. And the success of D66 and the GreenLeft shows the possibilities for the Lib Dems, by wearing its liberal and pro-European heart on its sleeve. There should be an opportunity for Britain’s Greens too, but they seem to have lost critical mass. Their move to being a party of the socialist left before the 2015 general election, including the adoption of Universal Income, was probably a major strategic error – and anyway the party seems allergic to clear leadership.

And so the Lib Dems at York went big for being pro-European, promoting a second referendum with a way back into the EU – and promoting the rights of EU citizens living in Britain. Political realists may dismiss this as being silly, but it lights fires. The populist surge, promoted by a hateful press, and supporting a hard Brexit, is generating a backlash, and the Lib Dems mean to exploit it.

But Mr Farron, and the party at large, are starting to look beyond that. That was evidenced by one fudge and one new idea. The fudge was on nuclear weapons. The party’s liberal principles point to unilateral nuclear disarmament, eloquently argued for by many activists. But members at large sensed danger and adopted a fudged policy that will go nowhere. As David Grace, one of those advocating the unilateralist position, rightly pointed out – the party was not afraid of the Russians so much as of the Daily Mail. While intellectually persuaded of the unilateralist line, I personally lacked the courage to support it. It would put off too many floating voters.

The new idea was put forward by Tim Farron in his speech: an economic commission of independent experts to develop new ideas on economic policy. This follows a similar idea on health and social care. This is a step that the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn started to take and then dropped – no doubt because he feared it would be a hostage to fortune. The time is ripe for new thinking on economic policy, and the Conservative government is heading for some deep trouble, with its over-commitment to austerity and low taxes, not to mention hard Brexit. Tim’s commission cuts across the brief of an internal policy group (on the “21st Century Economy”), which I am planning to contribute to, but this looks like a sound move by him. The party can’t carry a new economic policy by itself.

Tim’s strategy is clear. Develop a core vote based on European identity and a liberal understanding of British values. And then pitch for floating voters, including those that voted for Brexit, based on economics and public services. Could it work? Labour could yet scupper it by dropping Mr Corbyn and going for the right replacement leader. Their German counterparts seem to be having some success with such a strategy. The most convincing alternative leaders are probably David Miliband or Ed Balls – but both are out parliament. Meanwhile the threat of complete collapse remains – the Dutch Labour Party is only the latest in a line of spectacular political failures by traditional socialist parties in Europe. The Lib Dems will still need a lot of luck – but this looks like their best chance.

I do not warm to Tim Farron personally. I am too cynical for his grand rhetoric, and bored of his jokes. But he is proving to be a very capable political strategist – much better than his predecessor. This will be interesting to watch.

Last week’s British by-elections prompt me to make one of my occasional posts. It is about the bizarre predicament of Britain’s Labour Party and the wider question this poses for the British left.

The first thing to say about Labour is that I am not a neutral observer. As a supporter of the Liberal Democrats I have endured near continuous vitriol from Labour supporters, especially since the coalition government of 2010. It doesn’t help that these Labourites were right to predict disaster for my party – against my constant efforts to look on the bright side. So I take some satisfaction in being right this time. I cannot deny a sense of schadenfreude. Perhaps it takes a victim of delusion to recognise the phenomenon in others – though to be fair quite a few Labourites are in despair rather than delusion.

The immediate fuss is over Labour’s loss to the Conservatives of the Copeland by-election. For an opposition party to lose a seat in these circumstances is nearly unprecedented. Labour did see off a challenge from Ukip in the Stoke by-election on the same day – but they cannot take much comfort from that. Their vote fell, and they only retained the seat because Ukip and the Tories split the anti-Labour vote between them. It was a bit like the Lib Dem by election win in Eastleigh during the coalition, though the margin was much better.

But this fuss is a bit overdone. The main news politically is that Ukip is on the back foot, and the Conservatives seem to be picking up much of their vote. That’s still a big problem for Labour, though: while seeing off a threat from Ukip, the threat from the Tories has become much deadlier.

But the by-elections are only the start of it. It is Labour’s complete lack of political effectiveness since Jeremy Corbyn took over that is behind the criticism. Labour are totally unable to exploit the government’s difficulties over Brexit – a political gift that most opposition parties can only dream of. Just compare the party’s performance to that under John Smith and Tony Blair as the Conservative government pushed through the Maastricht treaty in the 1990s. Labour was then able to put aside its own differences and ambiguities over Europe to harry the Conservatives to near political death. This was an object the lesson in how to be on both sides of the argument at once – one of the chief skills in politics. Labour could unite pro and anti Brexit forces by rallying round a form of soft Brexit – and using every opportunity in Parliament to make the government’s life difficult. Instead Labour’s opposition sounds like whingeing Islington dinner table chat.

And what about opposition to austerity? The government is pressing ahead with cuts, and seems unable to handle a crisis in the NHS and social care. Schools are now under threat. Austerity was supposed to be the rallying cry for Labour under Mr Corbyn, and the basis of a popular revolt – with determined resistance both inside and outside parliament. Labour was going to employ high quality economic minds to develop an alternative narrative. Instead, Labour contents itself with more quiet whingeing, and austerity has dropped way down the list of politically current issues. The economic thinkers who had been commissioned to help the party have been sent on their way.

And Scotland? There was supposed to be a fightback here – but instead the party has fallen back to third place. At his speech to the Scottish Labour conference this weekend Mr Corbyn undermined the Labour’s Scottish leader, Kezia Dugdale, who is attempting to recapture the political initiative from the SNP with a call for a UK wide constitutional convention. Unable to come up with strong political initiatives himself, Mr Corbyn undermines any attempts to do so from anybody else. Politically Labour has stalled.

But a recent poll revealed something quite interesting. It confirmed Labour’s poor standing amongst the country at large, and the lack of confidence in Mr Corbyn, which is felt by over three quarters of the electorate, with remarkably few don’t knows. But among Labour’s remaining supporters, Mr Corbyn has majority support. His position looks secure.

And this reveals a problem for Labour, and the political left generally, that goes beyond Mr Corbyn’s profound lack of political competence. It is the temptation to retreat into your own comfort zone. For Labour, this process started under Ed Miliband, Mr Corbyn’s predecessor. It took the form of the so-called 35% strategy – whereby Labour was supposed to secure power by consolidating its position amongst left-leaning voters, especially those that had supported the Lib Dems, without having to persuade voters that had voted Conservative. They were relying on the idea that the right of centre vote would be split between the Tories, Ukip and coalition-supporting Lib Dems – and hoping that non-voters would rally to the party too. It left them helpless against a surging SNP in Scotland, and an entirely predictable and ruthless Tory campaign to pressure Lib Dem and Ukip voters in marginal seats.

But the idea of staying within your political comfort zone is enticing. The Liberal Democrats are now taking this up under the guise of a “core vote strategy”. This is designed to attract loyal supporters rather than marginal votes. This is more rational for the Lib Dems than it is for Labour, given how low the party’s fortunes have sunk. But neither party will pose a serious challenge to the Tories unless it works out how to appeal to marginal voters too. And neither will they be able to achieve this by forming some form of “progressive” alliance between themselves, with or without the Greens and the SNP.

And that will mean taking core supporters out of their comfort zone. Just where is open for debate. Conventional wisdom has it that this must mean embracing elements of what the left calls “neo-liberalism” – such as marketising public services and holding taxes and public spending down. This isn’t necessarily the case – but the electorate will not be convinced by the traditional left wing idea of accruing power to the centre and declaring “trust us: we are the people.” Political power is not trusted enough for that.

Personally I think Labour needs to embrace devolution of real political power to regions, municipalities and even neighbourhoods, even when it means passing it to opposition parties. This should involve a new constitutional settlement (just as Ms Dugdale advocates). And it includes breaking up central control of such hallowed institutions as the NHS and national public sector deals with trade unions. For Lib Dems I suspect it means developing a new narrative on rights – and the idea that key economic rights (as opposed to basic human rights) must be earned by contribution and residency, rather than being open to all comers. Also the parry’s doctrinaire line on the right to privacy needs to be rethought for the modern age – it feels too much like yesterday’s battle. Both parties needs to break out of the strait-jacket of political correctness and victim culture – while continuing to promote inclusion. And both parties need to think about a future Europe, rather than retreat into its past.

But once the left moves out of its comfort zone, power is there for the taking. The conservative coalition is not robust, and demographics are against it. Brexit will place huge strains on it. Populism will fail. But, alas, there are few signs that the left yet understands what it needs to do. It may take another disaster.

To judge by the stories coming up in my Facebook feed, you would think that Britain’s Labour Party was in its death throes. The party is further away from winning national power than ever, but it is far from dying. Something more subtle is happening.

The chatter arises from the two most recent parliamentary by-elections, where Labour’s vote has crashed. I have written about Richmond Park already – this was a straightforward squeeze to get the Tory out. A week later came Sleaford and North Hykeham – and this is much harder to explain away. This is a safe Conservative seat in Lincolnshire, which voted heavily for Brexit (unlike Richmond Park). The Conservatives lost a couple of percent in vote share, but Labour crashed by 7% to 10%, from second to fourth place behind Ukip (whose vote share fell by 2%) and the Lib Dems (who increased by 5% to 11%). Various other candidates scooped up an unusually large 11% (up 5%), including a Lincolnshire Independent who took nearly 9%.

The first thing to say about this result is that it is a remarkable victory for the Conservatives, a year and a half into this parliament. While Whitney and Richmond Park showed that pro Remain voters distrust the party, in pro Brexit seats (which are in a hefty majority in England and Wales) there seems to be no problem. It seems likely that they are picking up votes from Ukip, while losing a few Remainers to the Lib Dems. This seems to explain Ukip’s lacklustre performance in what should be home territory for them. But Ukip and the independents clearly picked up votes from Labour.

And thus come the predictions of Labour’s demise. Their lack of a clear message on Brexit, the main issue in British politics for the foreseeable future means that they are being squeezed by both the Lib Dems and Ukip, and will not be able to hold the line between the two. Voters sceptical of Brexit will be attracted to the Lib Dems; enthusiasts for Brexit will be tempted by Ukip or the Conservatives. Meanwhile Labour members’ attention is being drawn by its internal politics, as far left activists led by Momentum, fresh from their victory of re-electing Jeremy Corbyn as their leader, try to take control at all levels, and dictate the candidate selection process. The spectre of the party repeating the collapse it has already suffered in Scotland in England is raised. Amidst all the chatter, though, it was instructive to read Andrew Rawnsley in the Guardian. He describes how Labour veterans are consolidating their hold on the Labour organisation through solid, grassroots organisation. Momentum, an awkward alliance of veteran hard leftists (many expelled from Labour) and younger idealists freshly recruited to politics, is, in fact, losing momentum. Internal splits within the pressure group have been widely reported.

The truth is that in much of the country, Labour does not face a serous political challenge, and in a few places it is mounting a serious challenge to the Conservatives. The threat from from the Lib Dems is grossly exaggerated. The Lib Dems have barely begun to claw back their standing amongst both metropolitan leftists (who will not forgive the coalition with the Conservatives and the breaking of the party’s pledge on tuition fees) and working class voters of all ethnic groups. Richmond Park showed that such voters may once more hold their noses and vote tactically for the Lib Dems, but this logic does not affect areas where Labour is already strong. The Lib Dems seem to be mainly picking up Conservative Remainers – and that may help Labour rather than hinder it. Certainly in the area of London where I live the Lib Dem revival, such as it is, is evident in Tory areas, and there is no evidence of it all in the poorer estates.

Ukip threatens more, with an appeal to white working class voters, an important part of the Labour coalition. Labour seems unable to craft a message that appeals to these voters, or not without upsetting other important parts of the coalition, such as ethnic minority voters and metropolitan liberals. But Ukip is not a well-organised party. It lacks maturity. Furthermore its culture celebrates the awkward squad – the oddballs and angry types – from which it is hard to forge a cooperative team, as can be seen from the farcical attempts to replace Nigel Farage as leader. Liberals have a big advantage here – having a predilection to listen and cooperate. Ukip’s new leader, Paul Nuttall, is rightly focusing on Labour voters, but delivering a credible challenge will be an uphill struggle. They do not remotely present the scale of threat to Labour as the SNP have in Scotland.

And we must remember that Labour remains strong in large parts of the country, particularly London. They have plenty of members, strong local party organisations, and councillors. They have the ability to reach out to voters person to person to establish local bonds of trust. The party was not strong in either Sleaford or Richmond Park, so the results in these seats say little about how the party will perform in its strongholds. Around where I live the party is comfortably winning the local by-elections – and is as strong as I have seen it in 25 years or so.

So Labour is long way from dying. But it does seem to be in retreat in areas where it was not so strong in the first place. The Lib Dems do seem to be picking up here, resuming their role as the main challengers to the Conservatives in rural areas, to judge by a steady record of success in local by-elections (with another good set of results last night). As last week’s Bagehot column in the Economist points out, Britain’s political geography is fragmenting, with the country becoming a patchwork of different political contests. Labour will find it very hard to break out of its strongholds, as Lib Dems, Ukip and the SNP consolidate their hold on other areas.

Can Labour break out of this dynamic and regain a national appeal? It has been done before, in the 1990s by Tony Blair. The party’s current leadership, hopes to do so, with a re-launch promised. It hopes to pick up on an anti-establishment mood, using Mr Corbyn’s persona and a left-wing policy platform. We will see. Labour’s problem is less its policies than a perceived lack of competence, something that Mr Corbyn’s persona will do nothing to correct. The public may yet be attracted to radical left-wing policies in these strange times – but the platform is being developed in a process of members talking to themselves (which activists optimistically regard as “democracy”) rather than engagement with a sceptical public.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives have little to worry about from Labour. Their main worry is the internal tensions in their party arising from Brexit – a process that will be quite unable to sustain the expectations placed on it. As doubts over Brexit grow, the party’s support is bound to melt. That will be the big political opportunity. The Lib Dems and even Ukip are readying themselves for that moment. There is little evidence that Labour are. But the party is far from dying.

My (many) Liberal Democrat friends are ecstatic. The party has just won the parliamentary by-election in Richmond Park, overturning a massive majority from the sitting MP, Zac Goldsmith. As the dust slowly settles, what is there to learn about the state of British politics?

Richmond Park is quite close to where I live. I have been visiting it since the 1980s, helping out the local Liberals and then Liberal Democrats, including a few visits this time. It consists of the suburb of Richmond, together with a slice of Kingston, near Richmond Park, nearly up to Kingston town centre, and including the local hospital. The seat, and its predecessors, has been the scene of epic battles between Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. After a series of close results, the Lib Dems won it in the Tory collapse of 1997, with the rather eccentric Jenny Tonge as their MP (she kept testing the boundaries of what respectable politicians it could say about the Israel-Palestine conflict, transgressing on occasion – she has now left the party). She held the seat in 2001, but then stepped down. In the high water mark election of 2005 for the Lib Dems, which gave the party the illusion that seats that could be readily handed on from one candidate to another, the Lib Dems held the seat with Susan Kramer.

But in 2010 Zac Goldsmith, a local boy and inheritor of a substantial fortune, took the seat back for the Conservatives. He held it with a crushing majority (with 58% of the vote) in the Lib Dem meltdown of 2015, though the Lib Dem candidate, Robin Meltzer, managed to hang on to second place with 18% – a feat that could by no means be taken for granted. Many Lib Dem activists sighed and suggested that the influx of rich voters meant that the seat was gone for good.

But Mr Goldsmith was an independent minded MP, who had campaigned hard against the expansion of nearby Heathrow airport – which blights an area that otherwise offers sites of outstanding beauty. This is necessary for anybody that aspires to be an MP there. When the Conservative government under the new prime minister, Theresa May, finally opted to expand the airport, Mr Goldsmith fulfilled a campaign promise by resigning and standing as an independent. But the Conservatives did not put up a candidate against him, undermining his claim of independence.

Notwithstanding the mountain that the Lib Dems had to climb, expectations on the party were high. They had surged in the Witney by election, and a similar surge might take the seat for them. The Lib Dems had been doing well in local by elections (as well as Witney) over the summer, though their national poll rating remained dismal. To prove that that this improved electoral performance had substance, many commentators suggested that it was an election they had to win. All Liberal and Liberal Democrat revivals since 1945 had been led by spectacular parliamentary by election wins. If not here, where was that boost going to come from?

But Mr Goldsmith had clout on the issue that triggered the election: Heathrow. The Lib Dems had campaigned just as hard on the issue, and the government’s decision had proved the party’s contention that the best way to prevent the government from pressing ahead was for a strong Lib Dem party in coalition. Five years of coalition had held off the considerable political pressure for expansion. (Though Lib Dems might want to ask themselves why the party showed backbone on Heathrow, but not student fees). Barely a year of even a small Conservative majority and the resistance to expansion folded. But that’s a subtle argument, and the Lib Dems needed something bigger to shift enough votes their way. And so they campaigned on Brexit. Mr Goldsmith is a prominent supporter of hard Brexit, while the constituency voted 69% to remain in the EU. That did the trick.

What does this mean? Let’s start with the red herrings. First it says nothing about the state of play in Britain’s battle over Brexit. One of the strongest Remain constituencies voted for an anti Brexit MP. That does not change the calculations for a large majority of MPs, whose constituents voted to leave. What would change the nature of the debate is a large number of Brexit voters changing their mind. With 45% of the electorate still voting for Mr Goldsmith, there was no sign of that.

A second red herring is that the collapse of the Labour vote (they lost their deposit, polling less than their party’s membership in the constituency). This is what happens in this sort of by election, and says nothing about the party’s chances in a future general election. A resurgent Lib Dem party could be a worry, but Labour still holds the aces, and this should not be a problem for a half-way competent leadership. Indeed if the Lib Dems draw off Remain voters from the Tories, it could help Labour. That Labour voters can be persuaded to vote Lib Dem tactically does not hurt Labour at all. The reversal of this trend in 2015 was a disaster for Labour.

The first lesson I would draw is that the Lib Dems have nailed their colours to the pro-EU mast. That seems to cover about a quarter of the electorate, a big enough pool for the party to fish in in its current state. It answers the question “what is the point of the Lib Dems?”, as the Tories adopt Brexit as their own, and Labour collapse into muddle. Those Lib Dems, like me, who are inching towards some form of reconciliation will have to bite their tongues. We need to understand that this is the best way of that the party can demonstrate its open, liberal values and present itself as a bastion against the rise of nativism and intolerance. It does not quite answer the question of whether the party is going for a core vote strategy, though. If the party gets the by election bug they will be tempted to water the message down in pro Brexit constituencies.

The next lesson is that organisation matters in British politics, and that the Lib Dems still have it. It was possible to feel sorry for the Zac supporters, overwhelmed by a blitz of Lib Dem literature and canvassing, while not having adequate data themselves. Many of them felt shell-shocked, and the graceless Mr Goldsmith whinged about being crushed by a machine. This delighted Lib Dem activists. Having been written off in 2015, after being crushed by a ruthless Tory machine, to be accused of being a ruthless machine themselves is a compliment indeed. The party pulled together, mobilising old members and new, in an optimistic, cheerful campaign, led by their candidate, Sarah Olney, who only joined the party in 2015. Both Labour and the Conservatives, with their bigger and better party machines, will take note, and will not be too upset. Breakaway parties, such as some Labour members were contemplating earlier in the year, look as hopeless an enterprise as ever. Lesser parties, including the Greens and Ukip, are presented with a big challenge.

A further point of interest comes from the fact that Ukip and the Greens did not put up candidates, and instead deferred to Mr Goldsmith and the Lib Dems respectively. The former reflects Ukip’s current turmoil, and the party is weak locally – it has created no debt on the Conservatives. The Greens’ move is more significant. They too were in a weak position, and faced being crushed by the Lib Dem juggernaut, as Labour were. By pulling out they made a virtue out of this weakness and will have softened the attitude of Lib Dems to do electoral deals with party in future, as part of a “progressive alliance”. Under Britain’s first past the post electoral system this kind of dealing is a logical response that may well take hold. Labour came under quite a bit of pressure from many of its members to do the same. There was never much chance of this from the still very tribal Labour party with its weak leadership – and Lib Dems will be relieved. They do not want to be under any kind of obligation to Labour under its current leadership.

What we don’t yet know about this election is whether it will boost the Lib Dems national standing amongst the public. The media is starting to take the party more seriously, but it will be some time before we have enough polling evidence to tell. What is clear is that the party is in fighting form, and has a much greater political weight. That is good news for supporters of liberal values, for which it is the clearest upholder on the British political scene. If Labour and the Conservatives can take their reluctant liberal supporters less for granted as they face the challenge of the populists, it will make all those efforts by the party’s volunteers worthwhile.

I seem to be one of the few Lib Dem activists in south England that did not go to the Witney by-election – though I was one of the earliest donors to the campaign fighting fund. The party stormed forwards from fourth place to a respectable second, with 30% of the vote, with the Conservative vote being cut to 45% and Labour holding on to 15% (they had been second). This result has predictably been spun a number of different ways. But what does it really mean?

Let me start with a couple of disappointments. First the swing of 19% to the Lib Dems was dramatic, but not good enough to secure the party much publicity. The coverage vanished quickly, and hardly registered at all in some channels. The Lib Dems badly need some eye-catching event to give them momentum, so that the public will start returning to voting for the party. My impression locally is that people are starting to move the party’s way again, but aren’t ready yet. This result will not do it. Only a win would have given the party real momentum, and that turned out to be too far for the party to reach. The result boosted morale internally, but I don’t see it having much more impact than that.

The second disappointment is that the result illustrates just how low the party has sunk in popularity. The party put out a widely quoted release that if the swing were repeated at a general election the party would win 26 seats from the Conservatives. My reaction: is that all? I wanted to insert a “just” in front of the number 26. It doesn’t seem that long ago when a swing like that would have taken the party into an absolute majority in parliament, with hundreds of new seats. Now it barely recovers half of what the party lost last year. And that was a by-election, where swings of that magnitude are hard to repeat more widely. That feels a distinct let-down.

Moving on, though, I have found two distinct narratives. First consider this from John Rentoul in the Independent, and this from Political Betting’s David Herdson. Both take the view that the Lib Dems are reverting to type as an inchoate protest party, that will say anything to pick up votes in a by-election, or anywhere else. This lack of coherence, they say, would be disastrous for the party if returned to a position of national influence, as whatever they did, they would annoy a large part of their electorate. The other narrative is totally different, and comes from The Economist’s Bagehot. He suggests that the party stuck to a core vote strategy, promoting the party’s open, and pro-European, credentials. Witney, near the university city of Oxford, is promising territory for such a core vote strategy – but it remains a minority strategy. In that light 30% is about the sort of result the party should have been looking for, considering the entrenched Conservative hold on the area.

So which version is nearer the truth? As I didn’t go there, I am at a disadvantage. From where I was sitting I could see evidence of both. There was much talk of squeezing voters (especially Labour ones) and using bar charts to persuade people to vote tactically. The campaign led off with a complaint about cuts to the local NHS, which hardly looked like a core vote thing. But the party also made something of its contentious stand on Brexit – where it is still firmly part of the resistance, compared to the Conservatives’ enthusiastic embrace of Brexit, and Labour’s reluctant one. And the result, with the Labour vote holding up quite well, points to a core vote proposition.

In fact the party still faces a choice between the two strategies. It might leap into the euphoria of protest politics, which was such a striking part of the party’s rise in the 1990s and early 2000s. Or it could stick with a more patient but in the long term more fulfilling core vote strategy – where the party builds up a loyal following based on its values, before chasing after floating voters.

Right now the two converge. The party’s core voters are angry and up for a bit of protest voting. But on the showing of Witney, people not in agreement with the party’s open values remain reluctant to vote for it. The party leadership needs to hold its nerve and stick with the core vote strategy.

Theresa May, Britain’s prime minister, closed the Conservative Party conference yesterday with a striking vision of her political direction, which was consistent with speeches made by other members of her government. This is a marked change of tone from her predecessor, the rather liberal David Cameron, and his Chancellor, George Osborne. Brexit is at the heart of it.

Earlier this week, FT columnist Janan Ganesh suggested that the stream of social policies coming out of the Conservatives were an attempt to deflect the politicians’ obsession with Brexit. But this is to misunderstand what these policies are about – they are an attempt by the Conservatives to tell people that voted for Brexit that they “get it”. The vote to leave the EU is the starting point of the whole thing.

What Mrs May is trying to do is to adopt what I will call the “Brexit coalition” as a political base. This starts with her hinterland: the non-metropolitan middle classes – most especially their older members, as their children are going to university and becoming more metropolitan in outlook. This group has a nostalgic view of the past, and feel threatened by the cultural aspects of globalisation. All the talk of patriotism, the hard line on immigration and the attacks on liberal elites (Oh how sick I am of being told that I am part of a ruling elite when all I am is a school governor!). Other nostalgic policies, like promoting grammar schools are in the mix too.These are bedrock Conservatives, largely taken for granted by Mr Cameron.

What is more interesting is that Mrs May wants to add the disaffected working classes, who voted in droves for Brexit, notwithstanding the advice of the Labour Party. They share the cultural biases of the non-metropolitan middle classes, but add to this resentment about economic insecurity. Mrs May is making a particular pitch for this group: emphasising the struggles of people at the margins, though failing to observe how much austerity policies, such as changes to tax credits, have added to their hardship. For these people she made a strong pitch for “fairness”, and indicated that she would act on a series of economic problems, like housing costs and poor infrastructure. She also rounded on unscrupulous businesses. In parts she sounded not unlike Ed Miliband, Labour’s previous leader, allowing her to claim the “centre ground”. Strikingly she also included a pitch for ethnic minorities, acknowledging discrimination. Ethnic minorities make up large sections of the working class, after all – though the Brexit voters tend to be “I’m not racist but…” types who think it is them who are the victims of discrimination.

But one part of the Brexit coalition is being left behind by all this: the businessmen who called for a bonfire of regulations to make businesses more competitive. On the one hand Mrs May’s tough line on sovereignty, immigration and foreigners points to a hard Brexit, and so little need to heed EU regulations. On the other the threatened policies to limit immigration would add a very hefty layer of extra bureaucracy on businesses, and the appeals to “fairness” suggest a strong role for regulation and government intervention too. Regulation and democracy go together like a horse and carriage. They may be jumping from the frying pan into the fire. But this part of the Brexit coalition always mattered more for its money than its voter appeal.

It is possible to admire the political cleverness of this. Ukip, who had been harrying the Tories on their nativist flank, are struggling at the moment, and this sort of thing should see them off, in Conservative constituencies at least. One might ask what the point of Ukip is. It also takes advantage of Labour’s disarray. At their own conference Labour failed to discuss Brexit. Their leader, Jeremy Corbyn, seemed to embrace it – but (admirably) failed to bang the drum on immigration. Other Labour big hitters want it the other way round: oppose or soften Brexit, but wave the flag on immigration. This leaves muddle at the core of Labour’s message on the top issues of the day. The party will no doubt maintain its iron grip on public sector workers, and those vulnerable to government reforms (students, benefit claimants, etc.). I would also be very surprised if their grip on ethnic minority communities was seriously dented. But this falls way short of an election-winning combination. It is not clear what is their appeal to grumpy working class voters, to say nothing of the non-metropolitan middle classes that former Labour leader Tony Blair made inroads on the last time Labour won an election.

But speaking as an ordinary decent liberal and proud citizen of the world (subject to a sneering jibe in Mrs May’s speech), I am aghast at the direction the Tory Party has taken. The are stigmatising foreigners and implying that I am unpatriotic. Many of us are friends, neighbours and work colleagues with people who are not British citizens, and we look on them as equal human beings who have earned our respect and a place in our society. I find that impossible to reconcile with some of the rhetoric coming out of the Conservative Party. And it gets worse. The EU referendum unleashed a wave of hate crime and anti-social behaviour aimed at people who are seen as not belonging here (not just foreigners of course). Much as the leaders of the Brexit campaign claim that this is nothing to do with them, Conservatives run the risk of allowing these attitudes to take root, even as they claim that it is not their intention. In the same way Mr Corbyn will not call off the misogynistic hard left thugs that are part his own coalition, contenting himself with mild disclaimers.

This is now becoming a real political opportunity for the Liberal Democrats. The party is now the best home for open-minded people who do not have a nativist outlook – or those of them appalled by developments in the Labour Party anyway. It becomes easier for the party to take credit for the better bits of the coalition years – which had accrued to Messrs Cameron and Osborne – rather than just the blame for the bad bits.

That opportunity for the Lib Dems will grow if the Conservatives fail to deliver on their new promises, as seems almost certain. As soft Brexit turns into a mirage, and hard Brexit turns out to be highly disruptive, and as the Tories fail to deliver economic gains, such as lower rents and better paid jobs, to working class and other struggling communities, and as the party’s small parliamentary majority bogs it down, then the appeal of Mrs May’s government will diminish. With Labour looking like an empty bubble of hope (or a pyramid scheme as suggested by the Economist’s Bagehot column), there is reason for the Lib Dems to gain.

Of course, the Lib Dems themselves have many serious questions to answer. But it may be easier than people think for it to double its vote share to 15-20% before coming under more serious scrutiny. As the keener Lib Dem activists travel to the latest by-election in Mr Cameron’s old seat in Witney, Oxfordshire, it is impossible not to notice the spring in their step. The bookies are already giving them second place (from fourth in 2015).

But this is a small shaft of light in a very gloomy British political landscape, as the wonton act of self-harm committed by its electorate in the referendum pushes events on a seemingly inevitable course.

Tim Farron, the Lib Dem leader saved the best until last. His speech to close the party conference in Brighton yesterday was a barnstormer. He was interrupted by standing ovations several times. It was up to the standard set in Bournemouth last year. How much substance lies behind the expansive rhetoric?

The speech was ambitious. Tim set out make the Lib Dems the main opposition to the Conservative government, accusing Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party of abdicating the role. This is another example of the supreme, irrational optimism that, as former MP David Howarth pointed out in a fringe meeting, is the Lib Dems greatest strength and weakness.

Tim continues to use his big speeches to stake out the political ground for the party, on which we might hope for more substantial things to be built. The party’s policy motions at the conference failed to build anything much though. The many new members were no doubt delighted to meet up with so many like-minded people, and learn about how politics works – but would have struggled to understand what the policy debates were for.

Tim places the party is the unambiguously on the left (or among the “progressives” in the favoured, rather misleading word), by defining it in opposition to the Tories. With the Conservatives hitched to Brexit, this is safer than it has been – but not as safe as trying to get the party to define its own, distinctive place in politics. Interestingly he made an appeal for the Lib Dems to be the party of business and free enterprise, and urged businesses to switch allegiance – and this went down quite well amongst the members. This is not the first time he has planted such hints, but I’m still unclear of what it will mean. Where I want it to go is a model of regional economic development not dependent of central state largesse. We shall see.

But the main policy fields sketched out were on Europe, health and social care, and education. The party is unambiguously pro EU, wishing to draw in Remain supporters. Tim advocates a referendum on whatever alternative to the EU the government eventually reaches. This may be cunning positioning, but I struggle with the idea as serious policy. The “destination” as he calls it probably will not be clear until Article 50 has been invoked and the bridges burnt. Hopes for some sort of middle way between hard Brexit (being outside the single market or a customs union) and full membership are fading. Still this is changing terrain and a more coherent pro-EU position may emerge. Nothing came out of the conference on the party’s vision for the EU itself, even though the institution is clearly in crisis. Where Tim was much stronger was in acknowledging the concerns of working class Brexit voters, referring to his own Lancashire working class roots. He is not trying to blame the voters, but to build bridges. This must be right, if not entirely consistent with some ideas of a “core vote” strategy.

He is much braver on health and social care. Tim, and his former leadership rival Norman Lamb, have identified that health and social care are in crisis. Norman, who remains highly respected in the party, is putting together a commission of experts to develop new vision – and one that will probably involve higher taxes. This is promising – it entails some thought leadership on an issue the public really cares about. With Labour bogged down in union vested interests, and the Tories lacking convincing policy, this development starts to answer the question “why the Liberal Democrats?”.

Alas there was much less thought leadership on education. The party’s instincts are sound enough, but I don’t think Tim, or many in the party, have quite caught up with where schools really are, rather than some rather lurid caricatures. But with the Conservatives veering off to the blind alley of school selection, the political opportunity remains for the party. Yet it would be good if it could develop more ambition. There is a policy working group on education (I applied but was not included) – but these groups tend to square off the party’s internal pressure groups, rather than try to develop a wider public debate – which the health initiative is clearly intended to do.

Tim also developed a general direction of travel for economic policy. He wants more for the regions outside London and the southeast – led by infrastructure investment. He said that these areas had been let down by both the Thatcher and Brown/Blair governments, who were seduced by the bankers, and under-invested in infrastructure and skills. There is something in this. And he did not walk into the leftist trap of employing abstract villains, such as neoliberalism or austerity. This is all sound, but not very distinctive. He could have been much stronger on green investment, but I think the party has sound instincts on that.

But what of my question of last week, about how the party is developing a narrative on coalition? It still wants to play both sides on this, and Tim talks about it as little as possible. He neither sells the coalition’s achievements, nor condemns it as a mistake. I attended a very interesting fringe with former ministers David Laws and Chris Huhne on the coalition years. They acknowledged errors – on tuition fees, benefit reform and NHS reform in particualr, but still enthused on what the coalition had achieved. Fine, but the party still has to explain how it can be of the left and at the same time prop up a government of the right. “That was then, and this is now” is about as good as it gets. The truth is that it very hard for the party. Some members expressed frustration that it does not make more of its achievements – others find many of the things the coalition did (notably on benefits and legal aid) a betrayal of the party’s principles. Expect the muddle to continue for a while. Personally I want the party to rethink its exclusive identification with the left, while seeking to identify areas of agreement with it. The party will help the left by becoming semi-detached – but in the right circumstances it will work with the right too.

And that takes us to a further question. How will the party work with other parties to get things done? It is all very well for Tim Farron to condemn Mr Corbyn’s leadership of Labour as an abdication, but what if Labour, under Mr Corbyn or otherwise, gets its act together? Tim did not rule out working with other parties, and there was plenty of talk at the conference of working with Labour and the Greens. I have bought a book, The Alternative, which tries to develop this – and I will report back when I have read it. For now it is far too easy for us Lib Dems to simply rule out working with Labour and dream to replace them, rather than wake up to the cold, hard realities of how little party is trusted. Working with Labour is about the only way the party is going to achieve anything practical if it rules out working with the Conservatives again. It is fanciful to suggest that Labour will collapse and leave the field clear for the resurgence of the Lib Dems. But the party can still pick off Tory seats beyond Labour’s reach. Surely we are better off trying to get some form of constructive engagement?

What is clear to me is that the left needs to develop a new policy agenda which is capable of capturing the imagination of a sceptical public. The Lib Dems are engaging in this process. But, to put it at its kindest, it is far to early for the party to imagine that it can lead it.

This weekend the British Liberal Democrats go to their main annual conference, in Brighton. They expect little media coverage, but buoyant membership should ensure a lively event. These members face a troubling question: how to rebuild the party’s electoral base. To do this they will have overcome its ambiguous feelings about its recent past.

Notwithstanding increases in membership following the 2015 General Election and this year’s EU referendum, there can be no doubting the party’s dire straits. It lost the overwhelming majority of its elected representatives at all levels over the period 2010 to 2015, when it was in coalition with the Conservatives. It has just 8 MPs (down from 57). The party’s poll ratings bump along at about 8%, ahead of the Greens, but usually behind Ukip, and nowhere with sight of Labour, notwithstanding that party’s troubles, never mind the Tories. There have been gratifying local by election successes over the summer, but only where the party has sufficient ground strength to fight an intensive campaign; elsewhere the party’s vote is as like to shrink to 2-3% as to advance to the giddy heights of 10% or so. There is no sign of a substantive breakout.

To do this, as I have written before, the party is going to have to do two things, which are in tension. The first is to build up a loyal, core vote of people with open and liberal attitudes, that will stick with the party no matter what. The coalition years exposed the lack of such a core mercilessly. Even the 8% that party managed in 2015 can’t be classed as a core vote. And yet there are plenty of people out there who are potential core supporters, if the party can build trust. This is the pitch made by election expert Mark Pack and former Cambridge MP David Howarth. I broadly support this, but the second thing the party needs to do is win over floating voters at elections – people who don’t quite get the party’s core values, but who can be persuaded to support the party temporarily on, usually, quite narrow grounds.

This tension haunts all political parties, but Lib Dems need to understand it better. The problem is this: Mark and David have shown persuasively that potential core voters are left-leaning. But the most promising pool of floating voters are right-leaning. No other party is going after soft conservatives – and these could be decisive. The Lib Dems need to be a left-leaning party that can appeal to right-leaning voters.

There’s another dimension to the problem though. It is the general disengagement of the public from the ins and outs of politics. A friend, Douglas Oliver, made this point to me recently. He made the same point to columnist Matthew Parris in 2012. Mr Parris coined two laws; Oliver’s first law: “Memories dilute each other” and Oliver’s second law: “In the study of politics, close attention distorts judgement.” What Douglas is suggesting is that we who follow politics closely lose the wood for the trees. We are concerned with events and details that never receive the attention of the wider public. This has two consequences. The public will base their judgements on a much narrower range of facts and ideas than experts. And they have much longer political memories than experts, because events do not crowd out memories in the same way. It took over 20 years for Labour to exorcise the memories of their disastrous rule of the 1970s – and only then after their leader, Tony Blair, made that exorcism his prime focus – putting it ahead of party unity. Equally, Labour leader Ed Miliband’s failure to be clear about Mr Blair’s legacy fatally undermined the party at the 2015 election, leading to one of its worst results ever. The public weren’t impressed by lots of fancy new policies and warm words, and Miliband’s idea that the party should focus on the future, not the past. But the past is the main thing ordinary voters know about political parties.

That’s tough for the Lib Dems, because about the only thing the public really knows about the party is its record in coalition. All conversations by the party with ordinary voters will start with the coalition. The party might want to start somewhere else – Europe perhaps – but they are as unlikely to succeed as Mr Miliband was with energy prices, austerity or inequality. Which means that the party must decide what it thinks about its recent past.

There are two ways this can go. The first is to attempt what Tony Blair did with Labour. To exorcise the coalition years as a terrible mistake which the party will never repeat. This will need more than words. It will mean rebranding the party, perhaps even changing its name (though unfortunately there is another “Liberal Party” already registered – perhaps “the New Liberals”?), as well as relegating those closest to the coalition, such as former leader Nick Clegg, to the outer edges of darkness. If people leave the party, that only shows that it is serious. Confronting the past is more important than party unity, Tim Farron, the party’s leader, is sufficiently distant from the coalition to pull this off – though he would have to eat some words.

But it is risky. Because if you throw away the coalition, what are you left with? You have to build an alternative vision of what the party is about, and then then sell it to a public with a short attention-span. The vision needs to be different enough from the Green Party and Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour for ordinary people to care – and abstract dissertations about the nature of “liberalism” won’t do; there must be concrete contrasts on topics that matter. I hear quite a bit of use of the word “radical” from people of this general inclination, but very little about what they want to be radical about – apart from opposing any attempt to reform public services that does not involve a lot of extra taxpayers’ money. Which the Labour left already do. I’m being unfair, perhaps, but politics is a brutal business – and that’s how it looks.

Which leaves us with the second route: embracing the coalition years and claiming that time has vindicated them. At first blush this is just as hopeless. After all, if the public agreed with that idea, they would not have deserted it in droves. And there are aspects of the coalition years, especially the breach of the pledge on student tuition fees, that have taken on a high symbolic importance. Do the Lib Dems acknowledge mistakes, diluting the message, or brazen it out?

But there are advantages to embracing the coalition. It is a good starting point for a conversation with centre-right floating voters. Look at what happened when the Tories governed without a coalition: Brexit, grammar schools, tax breaks for the rich, etc. It is more challenging for the left-inclined potential core voters – but at least it drives a hard line between the party and the Greens and Labour. It shows that the party stands beyond tribalism for a new sort of politics; when needs must the party will deal with the Tories, provided that certain red lines aren’t crossed. That’s a tough message, but a distinctive one.

I am not a fan of internal party “democracy” (self-selecting groups like political parties are fundamentally undemocratic), but this is something that is best decided by party members. The most interesting thing about Brighton will be to see how that group of more motivated party supporters thinks about the coalition years. I doubt that they are yet ready to confront the party’s past in the way they need to, but there should be signs of which way the wind is blowing.

Not so long ago the idea of a “progressive majority” was popular amongst leftish intellectuals. They noted that if you added together the poll ratings, and even general election votes, of Labour, the Lib Dems, the Greens and (for some people) the Scots and Welsh Nationalists, there was a clear majority of the electorate, outnumbering the hated Conservatives and Ukip. This majority was regarded as a state of nature, and so, it was argued, proportional representation would lock it into the political system for good.

It was always optimistic. Both Labour and the Lib Dems drew voters who would happily support parties that were not “progressive”. This word is left’s own favoured description for itself. Since, in practice, most “progressives” oppose any kind of reform to make the state or the economy more efficient, I really can’t bear not to place it in quotation marks when it is used to represent the broad left, rather than those who genuinely favour ideas that stand for the positive progress of society..

The flaw in the progressive majority idea is now open for all to see. In the 2015 General Election the Conservatives and Ukip outpolled the “progressive” parties. And that is before any disqualification of the Lib Dems after they entered coalition with the Conservatives. And if that wasn’t enough, the clear majority for Brexit, not supported by the “progressive” parties, confirmed it. Most parliamentary seats for “progressive” parties voted to leave the EU.

This is a fact that the far left (I almost used the word “radical”, but once more the word would be seriously misplaced for a bunch that includes so many people nostalgic for the 1970s). Many are convinced that Labour did so badly in 2015 because it was not left wing enough, with its half-hearted embrace of austerity. Challenged, they suggest that there is an army of disillusioned non-voters who could be drawn into voting for a party of the true left. Certainly there are a number of under-30s that could fit that description, but not enough. In fact most people who explore the polling data suggest people who do not vote are often less-educated and supportive of populist right wing policies. The Brexit referendum was relatively successful in bringing these non-voters out, and they did not vote Remain.

And yet calls for a progressive alliance persist. The Labour left is sceptical, to be sure – to them Labour alone should be the progressive alliance. But many Greens and Lib Dems would contemplate ganging up with other parties in order to push forward progressive reforms. These include constitutional and electoral reform, sustainable economics, and stronger environmental protection. In principle I would support such an alliance, but only with a Labour Party genuinely committed to political pluralism – which rules out the current leadership.

And yet, even if Labour could be brought into the picture, the numbers don’t add up, even if the SNP could be brought into it. An alliance would need to present a serious challenge to the Conservatives in English constituencies. Labour and Green support might help the Lib Dems recover some of their lost seats; the Greens might pick up one or two seats. But it is very hard to see how Green and Lib Dem support would give enough help to Labour. Instead it is more likely that the Tories would successfully exploit Labour muddle to destroy the whole alliance.

So, is it game over for progressive politics? Not quite. Brexit may have won the referendum, but Remain still managed 48% of the vote. But that 48% includes a lot of people who normally vote Conservative. If a way can be found to peel these voters away into a progressive alliance, then it could be back in business.

And it isn’t hard to see what might do this. The Prime Minister Theresa May is enjoying a political honeymoon, but her party is at sixes and sevens over Brexit. It is not at all clear what shape a post Brexit Britain will take because her party is hopelessly divided on it. The moderates want to create a cosy relationship with the EU, in order to protect investment and the economy. But the Eurosceptics that make up so much of the party will not stomach the compromises that entails. Meanwhile, if the British economy goes into recession, as many fear, the pressure on government finances will drive further division. It is not beyond imagination that the only way out will involve a second referendum.

The Conservatives might split under the strain. That is unlikely. As Labour will find out as its MPs contemplate their position, the pressures for the large parties to stay in one unit under Britain’s electoral system are huge. There are no safe seats for breakaway parties, and safe seats are most MPs have no real idea of how to fight a hard seat or the stomach to do it. But the splits will undermine the Tory credibility, giving the chance for other parties to take their votes.

And surely this is the historic mission for the recovering Liberal Democrats. Labour has lost interest in anybody that has contemplated voting Conservative (as both leadership contenders vie to prove how left-wing they are), and the Greens have never had it. There is nobody else to fill the vacant space. For once the coalition experience may prove a positive. That might then revive the idea of a progressive alliance, though the credibility of the Labour Party would be a major obstacle. It remains the best chance for progressive politics.

The Lib Dems are understandably focusing on their core vote, and not on scooping up flighty floating voters. But in order to achieve anything the party will have to return to appealing to these voters in due course. Disillusioned Labour voters will not be enough. The party will have to detach centre-right voters too. That should be food for thought for the party as it tries to redefine itself in British voters’ minds.